Children are filled with imagination and creativity. It is well known that encouraging this creativity is beneficial to the development of a healthy child. To this end, children's toys are often designed to be not only fun for children to play with, but also educational, thereby encouraging a child to be creative and learn as he plays.
One activity that children enjoy doing that also stimulates their creativity is constructing things such as pretend forts, playhouses, castles, spaceships, and many others. Since a child will use whatever is available to construct these things, it would be beneficial if there were a child's construction toy that was safe and easy for the child to use.
Accordingly, there are several types of children's construction toys out on the market. Many involve the use of a hub and member arrangement, wherein a child connects linear member pieces to a plurality of hub pieces in order to construct the structure that he wishes. In order to achieve a variety of structures, many of these construction sets utilize a variety of different hubs that allow various angles to be achieved, which can be challenging to a child to figure out which hub to use at which intersection of linear members. Others utilize a hub with multiple inserts that could be difficult for a child to manipulate.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,402,581 discloses a hub and linear member system wherein the hubs are of varying types in order to achieve a variety of different directions and configurations. There are both elbow and tee hubs disclosed in the patent that a child would have to select in order to figure out how to build the particular structures he wishes.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,478,649 discloses another type of hub and linear member construction system. In this system, the arms are flexible and may be flexed either axially or laterally in order to create the desired structure. Also, the hubs disclosed have a variety of connecting surfaces to engage the arms, such as laterally expanding and contracting flexible loops, arms, coils, sleeves, cables, or spring-loaded forked arms.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,353,661 discloses a hub and linear member construction system having varying types of hubs depending on the particular radial direction that the constructor wants the linear members to extend. The linear members have holes punched in them which must be lined up with the holes on the hubs. A small key like locking device is then inserted to fasten the linear member to the hub.
It would therefore be beneficial if there were a child's modular construction set that would simplify construction for a child by having a uniform system of hubs and linear members that the child could employ. Not only that, but the construction set should be safe for a child to construct with a minimum of supervision.